Jean Bodin on International Law

This chapter argues that a reading of Jean Bodin offers important issues for the understanding of international law because he explicitly tried to develop, albeit briefly, a new branch of legal knowledge that had not existed before his time. This discipline had to comprise and to explain all rules that regulated the ‘public’ intercourse among commonwealths or ‘nations’. In this sense, and in the language of the sixteenth century, Bodin worked on the foundation of a ‘public law of nations’. He conceived the sphere of the relationships among commonwealths with the traditional conceptual means of iustum bellum and of fides, and this whole domain of legal and political experience was set under the principle of faith and loyalty. This tells us that the sovereignty proposed by Jean Bodin is less absolute than we would imagine at first sight.